Friday, February 19, 2016

Let the sampling begin!

After 11 days of transiting through cold and treacherous waters, we finally made it to our first station! We ended up steaming a bit west of our original line to avoid sea ice (the Revelle is not an ice-breaker), but that gave us the chance to go a bit further south and dip below the Antarctic Circle (~66.33 S). Now we can officially say we have visited the Antarctic!

Never missing a chance to commemorate an occasion, the crew decided to pose in front of one the many icebergs we saw this morning.

There wasn’t much time to lollygag though. We have a long month of sampling ahead of us and time is of the essence. Within minutes of our arrival, the science team and crew lowered the CTD into the water to start our first cast.

Josh, our res tech, getting reading to guide the rosette into the water.

It just so happened that we arrived at station 1 at 11:45am - 15 minutes before the end of my shift. After quickly prepping the rosette for deployment, Natalie and I passed off after our responsibilities to Seth and Hannah, who then took over the CTD watch. After staying up all night, I really should have gone to bed, but how could I when there is so much exciting things happening around me? Instead, I spent the next hour or so recording our first day of sampling. My shift is in 8 hours, so I will just dump these photos here for the time being.

That's all for now!

-EW

Hannah and Seth on the first CTD watch. Seth probably computing the next wire-out.

CTD back on deck. Let the sampling begin!

Viviane (our co-chief scientist) gets to be sample cop on station 1.

Look! An iceberg! It was well below freezing with windchill. I will keep my layers on, thank you.

8 comments:

It was just below freezing when we got to the Antarctic circle, so it was cold but not super cold. Still, you have to remember that it's summer in the southern hemisphere. So even though the temperature is just below freezing it as warm as it gets here!

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